and the black swan of history

Category Archives: Remembrance

Recently there has been a lot of media hyperventilating about federal parliamentarians needing to check their citizenship status and declare they are purely Australian, without any taint of dual-citizenship.[i] As usual, little of the pitchfork commentary is informed by history.

When the Australian constitution was drafted in the 1890s, allegiance was given to the Crown, not to a territory. We all shared the status of British subjects, and a person born in Australia could be elected to parliament in Britain, New Zealand, Canada and other places, and vice-versa. There was no need for renunciations or denunciations of allegiance. Canadian-born Labor MP King O’Malley, for example, Minister for Home Affairs, a founder of the Commonwealth Bank and of Canberra among other things, could be a member of the federal parliament because he was a British subject, and therefore not the liege of a ‘foreign power’ in breach of Section 44. There are numerous examples.

A lost world, bigger but now foreignised and forgotten.

Our world was so much bigger then. Once upon a time, a person born in Australia could work, travel, study and live anywhere the Queen reigned. Now we are confined to the continental high water mark. The post-World War Two nationalist victories that are celebrated in orthodox Australian history books now seem like one big own-goal, and we clearly are not living happily ever after.

Certificate of Naturalisation, as used 1955-1970

Post-war nationalism began with the dominions adopting citizenship acts – Canada in 1946, Australia in 1948 and so on. However, dominion citizens also remained British subjects. But, that dual-world soon began to shrink. Australia’s Department of External Affairs changed to Foreign Affairs in 1970. Britain abandoned the Commonwealth for Europe in 1973. Australia removed Australian citizens’ British Subject status in 1984. The High Court ruled in 1999 that Britain (and all other countries) had become ‘foreign powers’ so a dual citizen became, under Section 44, subject to a foreign power. For this ‘judicial-nationalism’, Section 44 was in interesting divertissement for years.[ii] Indignant talk of vestigial, archaic, unjust, obscure and antiquated law buttressed the arguments of political nationalists and continued to underpin our shrinking horizons into the early 21st century.

The external becomes weirdly foreign: Canberra Times, 7 November 1970: 1. Mr McMahon was born in Australia, and so never had to deal with being cast as a ‘foreigner’. He later became 20th prime minister, following six former PMs born elsewhere in the Empire or Commonwealth and one in a ‘foreign’ country.

Media commentators have blithely advised “just amend s44 by referendum” so that dual-citizens are eligible to be federal parliamentarians.[iii] It would just be an easy tidying-up. They appear unaware that we’ve been living through an extended period of foreignising anyone and anything ‘not like us’ (whatever that is).

The chronology continues. Through the 1990s republican nationalists cast the Queen as an indulgent foreign overlord, in the 2000s Little Australia nationalists cast boat people as invading foreigners, and in the 2010s the list has just gotten fatter and longer. Foreigners are everywhere, infesting the homeland and now we have a Home Office to root them out and expel them from our pure heart land. This week the bourgeois nationalists at Fairfax have resurrected the 1990s Queen-as-foreigner motif[iv], while the boofhead nationalists indulged in ugly schadenfreude at the number of federal MPs having to check their nationality.[v] Today, King O’Malley would either be barred at the gates, locked-up on an (ironically) foreign island or chucked out.

(left to right) The Governor General Lord Denman, Prime Minister Andrew Fisher, Her Excellency Lady Denman and Minister for Home Affairs King O’Malley, at the formal naming and foundation of Canberra. All were born overseas, but none were considered ‘foreigners’. Image, still from NFSA 9382

The only people who seem to have much historical awareness are some letter writers and online commenters, who make the same point as I have in my second paragraph. Some of them have questioned how New Zealand, Canada or Britain can really be ‘foreign’ cultures to us, ideas that likely smack of subversion for today’s authoritarian nationalists. Their arguments echo those of CANZUK for creating new ties between Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.[vi] Technology now triumphs geography. But should they be careful? The new Home Office may already have spots reserved for them in Nauru and Manus.

The Crossroads, Kingston, Norfolk Island with former remote detention facilities in the background. Photo mrbbaskerville 7 June 2009

I think we are at a crossroads. The old post-1945 nationalism of the Anglophone world is dead, or at least dying, along with its younger Neoliberal sibling.[vii] It is a time to think differently as the Indo-Pacific returns to centre-stage. A century ago, the whole British world had to re-invent itself amongst the residues of the Great War, and today, amidst more recent post-war residues spaces for another re-invention are opening. New histories are needed for new futures.

To continue on as if nothing has changed invites a referendum to change Section 44 (just imagine, for a moment, the No case against ‘foreigners’ sitting in parliament), and more lofty legal interpretations of Section 44 that, effectively, maintain a stalemated nationalism. Perhaps, instead of assuming Section 44 is the problem, we need to ask ourselves whether we have been so traduced by nationalist-induced fear of the ‘foreign’ that we are forgetting our own histories and foreignising our own past? How else to explain a centralising, militaristic, authoritarian Home Office?

An old tradition of antipathy to militarised over-reach in British and British-descended cultures – now reduced to a forgotten/foreignised/museumised history in Australia? ‘The Common wealth ruleing with a standing Army‘, Frontispiece to Thomas May’s “Arbitrary Government Display’d, in the tyrannick usurpation of the Rump Parliament”, 1683, British Museum collections

Parliament could define the phrase ‘foreign power’, for Section 44 purposes, to exclude Commonwealth countries. As well as honouring the original intent, it will also recognise our long, complex and continuing history of multi-generational migration between Commonwealth countries. Most of the reported ‘problems’ of dual-citizenship are intra-Commonwealth, suggesting a foreclosing amnesia about the larger world we once inhabited.[viii]

Perhaps that small change might even lead to reducing vitriol directed at people and things ‘not like us’, now fashionably tarred in high offices and the media as pejoratively ‘foreign’? If not, I fear the day when all but those with a one hundred percent First Fleet ancestry will be denounced as foreign – and even they will be suspect.

Who, if any, are the ‘foreigners’? Queen Elizabeth II with the Commonwealth’s women prime ministers: from Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina (left), from Australia, Julia Gillard (second right) and from Trinidad & Tobago, Kamla Persad-Bissessar, during the opening of 2011 CHOGM in Perth, 28 October 2011. Photo credit: John Stillwell/PA Wire

[vii] there are many examples to cite, just two recent being Ross Gittins, ‘History’s pendulum is changing course’, Sydney Morning Herald, 19 July 2017: 18-19, which quotes The Economist magazine “the neo-liberal consensus has collapsed”; Bernard Keane, ‘The surprisingly quick death of neoliberalism in Australia is underway’, Crikey, 21 June 2017

Like this:

The Great Arms of the City of Paris have told many stories since 1358, but perhaps most importantly of all, a story of continuity over 650 years of troubles and dramatic changes.

The motto of the city, Fluctuat nec mergitur, is usually translated into English as ‘She is tossed by the waves, but does not sink’, or in French ‘Est battu par les flots mais jamais ne sombre’. Its a story of resilience, and a perfect reminder that however gloomy and scary the times may seem now, a great city always rises again.

See and reflect upon the Arms of one of the world’s great cities. We are all in that boat. Paris will never sink.

Like this:

Today, it snowed in the Blue Mountains where I live. Today has been marked by commemorations of the first anniversary of the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine, and the murder of everyone on board. Today, wattle blossom was for remembrance.

Among those killed was one of my old high school teachers in Geraldton, Western Australia. Nick Norris, or Mr Norris as I knew him, was well-liked by his students, captain of the school cadets, and well known to all when I was a teenage boy at Geraldton Senior High School between 1971 and 1975.

He was not one of my regular teachers, but I well-remember a day when he stood in for a teacher in a class dealing with human relationship and sex education. The bogans at the back of the class were creating their usual disruptions when he called the ring leader out to the front of the class and gave him the opportunity to share with everyone his knowledge of the venereal diseases that he had been telling his mates about in the back row.

Seeing one of the school bullies red faced and fumbling for words was one of those delicious moments that remains forever in the minds of every school boy and girl who has been subjected to a school bully. At that moment, when the power of a bully crumbled before our eyes, Mr Norris became one of those heroes never forgotten. He showed us that bullies can be stood up to. He gave us back a power we thought we had lost. It’s a lesson I’ve never forgotten, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who will remember.

That Mr Norris, all these years later, became a victim of the most vicious and invisible of bullies, makes his death even more meaningful. It exposes the awful violence at the heart of nationalism, and through this tragedy we saw the tragedy lived every day by the poor people living among the sunflowers. That his death was shared with his grandchildren and so many other people on that plane makes their loss even sadder and more hurtful. But, as the commemorations today have also shown, neither Mr Norris nor any of the other passengers and crew are forgotten.

Vale Mr Norris and everyone else murdered on that awful day over the sunflower fields of Ukraine. Your presence will live for a long time yet. You were, and will always remain, a true champion.